Present Perfect

Work

Time flies so fast and I keep wanting to note down stuff for later because I do not want to forget what I'm going through.

I'm a radio broadcast engineer by trade, and I got appointed CTO at the start of this year. It's just a fancy name in practice, because it's not like I make much more than before, and basically it just means I'm even more responsible for what gets done by myself :) In effect, our technical team is down to two people.

Anyway, so we have a bus that drives through the whole country, from which we broadcast every day for three hours. The bus was incredibly over time in being ready for us to work in, and the PC's with the proprietary broadcasting software were delivered late, and so on.

And now it seems that the broadcast PC's have a tendency to skip during playback. I just noticed that the memory used by the playback program had climbed up to using about 700 MB, and when during the newsbreak I exited it, it all got freed at once. Beside that, we have loads of other problems, as well as not having enough resources to fix things properly.

I don't want to complain too much, but it seems I'm at a point where I grow increasingly irritated at the fact that I've had 50 to 60 hour work weeks on a regular basis and it doesn't look like that is going to change any time soon. And my boss keeps telling me that it will all pan out once I get everything arranged and delegated.

The trouble is, I end up having to delegate the things I like doing myself , so there's something wrong there :)

I love my job, but sometimes it pains me to not be able to figure out how to get out the rut.

Today though, I'm starting to feel like I'm slowly getting control back of the things that were going on above my head. I'm just going to take down everything that annoys me or that needs to be done one by one until it's all good.

Birthday

So, my girlfriend and my housemate and his girlfriend set up a surprise birthday party for me yesterday ! I was amazed - I know everyone says this, for a surprise party, but I had no clue at all. I had a shitty day at work, but it just made it all better. My girlfriend had invited me to go out and eat something, and we had Mexican in Gent, which was great. I only remembered it was my birthday because she asked me out last friday. And for some reason she really managed to not attract suspicion at all.

We drove with her car because all of the drinks were in her trunk, and I didn't notice she wanted to drive her car. She drove really slowly on the cobblestones and she said she was afraid of the trams, when she was just driving slowly to not break the bottles. And she kept telling me how she was happy we were alone with the two of us for dinner so we could have a nice relaxing evening.

I didn't even smell the coffee when she asked me to wear the silly "happy birthday" hair pin in the car.

So picture me, wearing that stupid thing, walking into my house, and seeing wardv sitting there, when we just talked about inviting him over now that he's back from London. It still didn't register. Then I take another step and I see April, his girlfriend, sitting here. Still no clue. And I take one more step and the living room is filled with people I know, and I'm thinking, why are they here and why wasn't I invited ?

And then I think, hm, I must look silly with that hair pin on. And then I think, wait a minute, these people are here for me. And I look stupid !

And then it hit me, I got set up. No nice quiet evening with the two of us... I've been had !

I had a great evening that more than made up for the crap day at work. Apparently someone hijacked my camera and took pictures, so I checked and uploaded them. I'm sure other people have more pictures, maybe someone even has the stupid hair pin...

So, thank you friends ! My first surprise party was a success.

GStreamer

As for programming, haven't had much time due to work. Hope to get back to that really soon. I have some pending commits still to do, some bugs still left to fix, and we really need to get on with the error stuff.

Music

Saw a great Radiohead concert ten days ago. They're not the same Radiohead I've seen seven times before, but they were awesome. It's incredible how a band that has amazing songs like Blow Out, You, Thinking about you, High and dry, My Iron Lung, No Surprises, Climbing up the walls, and more, can play an incredible two hour set and not play any of these great songs...

And last week, a very good Counting Crows show. Adam is looking more and more like a pineapple every day, and I still can't get over how some guys in the band take on a hard rock pose when they play the simplest of guitar solos, but the music is still very very good.

As for CD's, bought five more, among which the Yeah Yeah Yeah's and the Mars Volta discs stand out. And Dave/Dina just passed the "800 CD's" mark yesterday. 50 GB of good music, that's how I like it.

Sorry

Again for the decidedly non-technical content. I could go on about the issues we have with broadcasting and the IT-related problems there, but it's unlikely you'd be interested :)

Work and the days go by so fast Time flies so fast and I keep wanting to note down stuff for later because I do not want to forget what...